GCSE students poised for results

24 August 2011 Last updated at 23:42 GMT Students starting 2012 will have to sit all their exams at the end of the course About 750,000 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are due to find out their GCSE results, with another year of record scores likely.

The proportion of entries awarded the top grades has risen every year since the exams were first taken in 1988.

For the first time, most courses this year were taken in bite-size chunks, but coursework has been cut down.

The results come amid concerns that pressure to do specific, more academic subjects will "demotivate" students.

Schools will be able to give results to students from 0600, with one exam board, Edexcel, allowing pupils who have signed up beforehand to log in to a website and access them from home.

Last year saw 22.6% of exams awarded an A* or an A grade, up from 21.6% the previous year - while 7.5% gained an A*.

Education expert Prof Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, has predicted that the figures may top 23% and 8% respectively this year.

'Culture of resits'

He said the shift to modular assessment, under which students can resit chunks of the course if they fail the first exam, might "push the results up".

But on the other hand, coursework has largely been replaced with controlled assessments taken in test conditions, which might "hold them down", he added.

Previously, some young people "clocked up a lot of points by producing massive bits of work and perhaps drawing on the help of parents and friends", he said.

The change might also help narrow girls' lead over boys in the results, as female students tend to be better able to apply themselves consistently over extended periods of time, he said.

Modular GCSEs in a wide range of subjects, apart from English, maths, ICT and science, were taught from 2009.

But Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced they will now be phased out, in order to end the "culture of resits" in which pupils can resit modules as they go.

Students starting GCSEs from September 2012 will have to sit all their exams at the end of the course.

Subject 'pressure'

Most students receiving their results this year will have started their courses before Mr Gove announced the English Baccalaureate in 2010.

This refers to a set of A*-C passes in maths, English, a language, two science qualifications and either history or geography.

But the head of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, Mary Bousted, suggested some pupils had been pressured to change to EBacc subjects during the past year.

"We hope that those pupils, whose schools felt pressured into changing their GCSE subjects midway to meet the English Baccalaureate, do not suffer as a result," she said.

The new focus on EBacc subjects "risks demotivating and alienating" thousands of young people who struggle with academic subjects, she said.

Russell Hobby, General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, cautioned against the "usual debate about what constitutes a good or bad subject".

"That misses the point... a well-taught media studies course is better than a badly taught English literature course," he said.

'Academic core'

A spokesman for the Department for Education said that the proportion of pupils doing these five core academic subjects has plummeted from half of all pupils in the late 90s to just one in five now.

The EBacc is not compulsory and "is only one measure of success", the DfE said, and "pupils should study what is right for them".

But the subjects formed an important core of academic study and would make young people more employable, the spokesman added.

The results come amid concerns about cuts to careers services and Education Maintenance Allowance study grants for low-income 16 to 19-year-olds.

On Tuesday, the head of the Association of School and College Leaders, Brian Lightman, warned that 16-year-olds faced "unprecedented challenges".

The numbers staying on in education between 16 and 18 are rising.

But DfE figures published on Wednesday showed a rise in the number of 18-24 year olds not in education, employment or training in England.

At 18.4%, the number is higher than any second quarter figure since 2006.

Most pupils in Scotland take Scottish Standard Grade and Higher qualificatons, rather than GCSEs and A-levels.

They received their results in early August.

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Discovery poised for final flight

24 February 2011 Last updated at 10:48 GMT By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News Discovery on the pad and ready to go The US shuttle Discovery is all set to make history by launching from Cape Canaveral for the very last time.

The oldest of Nasa's three surviving orbiters has been given the "go" to take six astronauts and a big box of supplies to the space station.

It will also deliver a sophisticated humanoid robot to the outpost.

US politicians have called time on the shuttle fleet, with the expectation that just two further flights will be made before the ships head to museums.

"The last flight of all three vehicles is going to be emotional for all of us but we're going to complete these missions as we always do," said shuttle launch director, Mike Leinbach.

Lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A complex is timed for 1650 local time (2150 GMT).

The US space agency (Nasa) has struggled to get Discovery away on her final voyage. Technical problems have resulted in months of delay.

She should have flown in September last year. That slipped to a target of November, which then drifted out to February when cracks needed fixing in the orbiter's giant external fuel tank.

Discovery is regarded as the "leader of the fleet". First launched in 1984, it has since completed 38 missions, travelling some 230 million km in the process.

Shuttle Endeavour is expected to fly to the station in April. Atlantis will go no earlier than June, if Nasa has sufficient money left in its shuttle programme budget.

Following the fleet's retirement, the plan is for US astronauts to fly to the space station on Russian Soyuz rockets until perhaps the middle of the decade.

A number of American companies then hope to be in a position to sell launch services to Nasa on a range of new vehicles.

The intention is that the agency should put its efforts into leading the development of a large rocket - known as the Space Launch System - that can send astronauts beyond the space station to destinations such as asteroids.

Congress has set out the broad capabilities it expects to see in this rocket and has given a deadline of 2016 for its introduction. However, Nasa has said it cannot deliver such a vehicle in the time and with the budget the politicians have specified.

"We're still working on what's next," said Mike Moses, who chairs the agency's mission management team.

"We have this path toward exploration with developing the SLS, putting the multipurpose crew vehicle on top of it, funding commercial entities to help us get into LEO, [in a] faster, better, cheaper way.

"All that's really good future for Nasa; it's just not the same as we're doing right now, which is launching shuttles every day."

Astronaut Steve Lindsey will command Discovery. Eric Boe will be the pilot. They will be joined by mission specialists Alvin Drew, Michael Barratt, Nicole Stott and Steve Bowen.

Bowen was called in late to replace crewman Tim Kopra who was injured in a bicycle accident last month.

A key task will be to deliver the Italian-built logistics module known as Leonardo. The module, which is used as a packing box for supplies in the orbiter's payload bay, would normally return to Earth with every shuttle mission, but for Discovery's flight it will be left on station to provide extra storage space.

There has been particular interest in a "passenger" being carried up in Leonardo. This is Robonaut 2, or R2, the first human-like robot in space.

R2 is the product of 15 years' research in Nasa and General Motors.

In its current guise, the robot is just a head, arms, and a torso mounted on a pedestal. But the plan eventually is to give R2 some legs to let it move around the station. And in a couple of years, it will also get a body upgrade that should significantly advance its capabilities.

The expectation is that before the decade is out, this robot will be clambering about on the outside of the space station, assisting astronauts on a spacewalk. Inside the station, R2 is likely to take on many mundane tasks such as cleaning.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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